Sunday, December 25, 2016

Christmas on Big Cat Mountain.

Christmas of 1993 found me living as
Robert Weaver with my wife Laura in a travel trailer behind the South
Forty restaurant at the base of Big Cat Mountain. We were Rob and
Laura, a nod to The Dick Van Dyke Show. We had a potted barrel
cactus, about three feet high, that we brought in and decorated for
the holidays that year. Living there was a major coup for me. Lucky
Tailor and I explored that mountain on our first trip to the
Southwest. I tracked literary icon Joe Cordoba (Jose Luis Cordoba,
also working under an alias) to that restaurant. I thought it quite
fortuitous that we lived and worked there.

Lagartija's mother told me about the
legend of Big Cat Mountain, also known as Cerro del Gato, many years
before on that first smuggling trip. I have heard different versions
of the story since. The Arizona Star ran an article a few years ago
and muddied the waters with a feature writer's blend of various
legends purported to tell the story of El Gato. I prefer Senora
Lagartija's tale, and will relate it as such.

In the late 1800's, the Butterfield
Stage passed through the gap between Big Cat Mountain and Little Cat
Mountain. There was a bandit there who would hide and wait and rob
the stagecoach, which frequently hauled gold from California or
payroll for the mines. No matter how prepared they were for the
attack, the bandito would appear suddenly and then disappear into the
mountain, defying chase. They say he was like a cat the way he moved
on the rocks, and called him El Gato. In Spanish they called it “The
Hill of the Cat” Cerro del Gato. Eventually, El Gato (or some say
El Tejano) was killed. But his stash of stolen loot was never found.
It is said he hid it in a cave at Cat Mountain.

I've spent thousands of hours
exploring that mountain and found much more than I ever looked for. I
only found one cave, and I am probably lucky to have survived it.

A couple of weeks before Christmas, I
was following a wash at the base of the north side of the mountain
that had previously led me to water at an old stone cattle tank. I
hoped to see Javelina there, and track their game trails to see where
they would take me. Once in the wash, below desert level, I stopped
for water and smoked a joint and ate a Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream
Pie. I continued on, and at some point realized I wasn't in familiar
territory.

The walls of the arroyo closed in. I
remembered it as being quite wide, but before long, the wash was
barely ten feet across. The dirt walls were maybe ten feet high.
Somehow, with the buzz, I had taken an unnoticed fork into the
foothills. I am always curious about what is around the next corner,
particularly when hiking washes. So regardless of knowing I was lost,
I continued around the next corner, then the next.

At one point, I had just made a ninety
degree turn to the left and again about ten feet was a ninety degree
turn to the right. About eye level, directly ahead in the dirt wall,
was the mall entrance to a cave or dark declivity. It was about a
foot and a half high in the middle and stretched to tapered ends
maybe ten inches high. It was about three feet long. I approached to
about two feet. That's when I saw movement in the hole.

A recent newspaper article had told me
about coyote pups suffering from parvo. There was an effort from some
organization, to immunize the pups by dropping meat with the parvo
vaccine in the desert. I wondered if there were coyote pups in this
hole.

It was difficult to focus on the
movement in the dark cave, because the sun was high above the arroyo
wall. I squinted into the darkness as my eyes adjusted and the
movement took shape. I was looking straight into the eyes of a
mountain lion from two feet away. The puma's head filled the central
opening to the cave. She squinted back at me.

For some odd reason I wasn't scared.
Continuing on didn't seem wise. I was worried I might surprise her on
the return trip. I backed up to the previous turn, and slowly walked
away, being careful not to act like dinner.

But this is a story about a Christmas
hike, so we will get back to that.

Partially because of my experience
with the lion, Laura and I chose to traverse the South side of the
mountain to a trail head that leads to the summit, where we would
celebrate the holiday in solitude far above the valley. Rather than
follow the desert to the trailhead, we climbed a few hundred feet up
the rock and traversed our way east. Along the way we smelled
something rank, and looked around for the carcass of a dead deer. I
often found skulls and antlers in the area, and that translated to
tourist cash.

We were about to search for the
corpse, when my eye fell on a bush barely three feet away. There
stood a young male javelina, seemingly oblivious to us. Javelina are
pretty blind. They smell bad too. We edged away so's not to frighten
it, and continued on our way. It was a warm day and I took off my
shirt. Laura lamented that social mores did not allow her to do the
same. I told her out here on Christmas day, the Javelina cared less
for social mores, so she continued hiking topless. We took our
pleasure then, clinging to some vertical stones (Merry Christmas),
clinging for our lives somewhat frightened and high above the Sonoran floor. Such are the
dangers of climbing with a topless Laura.

Once we'd attained the apex of Big
Cat, we repeated our endeavors on a long flat rock overlooking the
valley, occasionally hearing a large animal moving across the
gravels. We dressed hurriedly, sans T-shirts, just in time for a boy
scout troop to file past along the peak. Not the large animals we
expected. Two of them lingered behind a boulder for another peek. I
gave them the thumbs up. They grinned and scurried away. Laura felt forced to adhere to
social mores for a bit.

We returned to our little trailer in
the desert with our barrel cactus Christmas tree.She never let me nail her on a mountaintop again.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Google+ Badge

About Me

I was arrested for possession of LSD in 1992 and threatened with a 42 year sentence. I split and spent the next fifteen years as a fugitive. The last five years I lived in the forests of Arizona. These are essays about some adventures I had during my journey to freedom .